Thursday, October 17, 2002

Computer technology is advancing so rapidly that we're running out of Greek superlatives to describe memory capacities. "Kilobyte", "megabyte" and "gigabyte" are now commonplace terms, and many people are familiar with "terabyte". After "giga-" and "tera-", we still have "peta-" and "exa-", but then we run out of Greek prefixes. As corporations start archiving more and more data, this could become an interesting problem. (Via Techdirt.) Update: Christepher McKenney was kind enough to point out that the SI system includes additional prefixes beyond "exa-" including "zetta-" and "yotta-". Reminds me of the imaginary letters past "Z" in my favorite Dr. Seuss book, On Beyond Zebra.